Dr. Lilja Magnúsdóttir has taken on the position of Head of Resource Management at HS Orka. She was previously the company’s chief reservoir engineer after joining HS Orka in the fall of 2020. Lilja takes over the position from Guðjón Helgi Eggertsson, who held it for five years.
“I am excited to lead this powerful department and to continue in the knowledge and innovation mindset that is prevalent at HS Orka. We have exciting projects ahead of us, but the department is responsible, among other things, for determining the locations of new boreholes, monitoring and measuring important factors in our geothermal systems, as well as developing conceptual and numerical models. The goal is to understand the behavior of the geothermal systems and utilize the resources efficiently and sustainably.”

Lilja completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of Iceland and earned her doctorate from Stanford University’s Department of Energy Resources Engineering in 2013. In her doctoral thesis, Lilja investigated the optimization of geothermal energy production by linking numerical models to measurements. There she developed a method for estimating fracture connections between boreholes using electrical conductivity.

After completing her doctorate, Lilja took on a postdoctoral position at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From there, she went to Tesla in California, where she worked as a senior engineer in design and development for the company’s solar division. In 2016, Lilja began working on geothermal research using artificial intelligence at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Iceland.

Lilja grew up in Reykjavik but lived in California for 11 years. There she met her husband, Gregory Zarski, and they have two children.

HS Orka is the third-largest energy producer in Iceland and operates two geothermal power plants, Svartsengi and Reykjanesvirkjun, as well as Brúarvirkjun in Biskupstungur in South of Iceland and Fjarðarárvirkjanir in Seyðisfjörður in the North East region of Iceland.